The development of complex military equipment has traditionally been based on a rigid, top-down approach, originating with the publication of a customer operational requirements document. The prime contractor decomposes the operational requirements document to allocate requirements at a weapon system level, which in turn are further decomposed and allocated at the subsystem and component level. This top-down hierarchical approach ensures that customer requirements are reflected in lower-level requirements and become integral to the objective weapon system design. This approach, however, does very little for optimally allocating limited resources across the weapon system so that a desired capability is optimized. Objective characteristics of the operational design often exceed program constraints. In addition to the resulting suboptimized designs, this top-down approach leads to misallocated development resources and an inability for the development process to rapidly respond to the inevitable changes in operational, fiscal, and technological considerations.
Customer recognition of the dilemma described above and the reality of tight fiscal budgets have had a noticeable philosophical change on the way future weapon systems can be developed and procured. The development of future weapon systems will be cost constrained and a weapon system's capabilities will be driven by the customer's ability to procure funding. In addition, the geopolitical landscape has radically changed during the past decade, so that most forces are no longer forward deployed, but rather are forward deployable. The ability to project force around the world, and the ability to sustain a force outside a customer's sovereign territory, has placed a tremendous burden on the logistical operations of customers. For example, providing fuel to an extended force is by far the largest burden on logistics. This demand can be cut significantly by reducing the weight of the military equipment. The size of military equipment also has a significant effect on the ability to carry or transport and to use the equipment. The need for lighter, smaller equipment has, in essence, elevated the importance of weapon system weight to the same level as weapon system cost. Total weapon system cost and weight have become limiting resources in the development of future military weapon systems.
In response to the changing fiscal and geopolitical environment, some customers have established a mission need and a partial list of non-negotiable operational requirements for future weapon systems. These customers have requested that prospective weapon system developers design, develop, and demonstrate a credible simulated modeling approach to satisfying operational and weapon system requirements and to developing weapon system designs that allocate constrained resources and optimize performance according to specified measures of effectiveness.
Previous efforts to develop software for weapon systems have focused on stand alone simulation software or software that provides analysis at the subsystem or component level only, because methods such as the top-down approach described above were used to manage the overall design and development process. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,926,362, entitled Airbase Sortie Generation Analysis Model (ABSGAM), describes a computer simulation model whose objective is to analyze the sortie generation capabilities and support requirements of air vehicle designs and to perform effectiveness analyses on these designs. The model cannot be used to allocate resources across the system or various subsystems or components of the design nor used concurrently and interactively to analyze design work. Another similar invention is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,415,548, entitled System and Method for Simulating Targets for Testing Missiles and Other Target Driven Devices.
It would be advantageous to have an evaluation and simulation system that functioned integrally with the conceptualization, design, and development of complex military weapon systems under conditions whereby design concepts can be analyzed, constrained resources can be allocated across a weapon system architecture in a manner that optimizes the weapon system's combat effectiveness, and a virtual representation of the weapon system can be tested under simulated combat conditions for combat effectiveness. Moreover, it would be advantageous to allow the user of such an evaluation and simulation system to establish performance levels for operational, system, subsystem, and component requirements, while optimizing the weapon system's combat effectiveness and satisfying the resource constraints.